I heard on yesterday's news of yet another supposedly random shooting in a public place. This time it happened at a Denny's in California. As is so often the case, the "shooter", as the proliferators of this deadly activity are invaribly called, was characterized as a "homeless" person who had been living in his car and who fired upon the Denny's lunchtime crowd without seeming provocation. The scenario is a chilling one, of course, and tragically common in this day and age. For a long time now, perhaps the last twenty years, I've become used to looking at these horrible public bloodbaths as "signs of the times," Signs that society is on the fast track to oblivion, or at least on a downward spiral to its most base level of being. But is that really true? Perhaps these kind of random shootings are simply symptoms of our basic human dis-ease with the nature of modern life in general, and it is only the sweeping eye of technology that has made them seem more frequent. Surely throughout history there have been random, senseless crimes that never made into the newspaper headlines, either because there were no newspaper headlines in which to put them or because the crimes were enacted upon those who were deemed unnewsworthy. How many times must innocent Native Americans have been slaughtered for "no reason" other than a political one? Or African Americans? Or the much maligned Irish, the Jews, gays, Kurds, early Christians, alleged witches, and so many other cultures and groups who have at one time or another felt the weight of undeserved persecution from another, self-proclaimed "superior" race? I don't mean to minimize the deaths of the three men who died at Denny's yesterday, one of them the shooter himself. Without a doubt, the deaths of all three men left gaping, painful holes in other people's hearts. As the poet John Donne wrote so profoundly several centuries ago, "Send not to ask for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee." I can't read or write that magnificent line without tears welling up in my eyes. And so, no, I do not mean to minimize those deaths. But it does seem to me that the chilling nature of the news report that brought those deaths to national attention comes from the seeming closeness of the event. It happened at a Denny's, for God's sake! A Denny's! You could have been eating lunch there, with your kids, your grandmother! So close! Such a normal, well-lit place! But all the other deaths, all over the world, for whom the bell tolls so ceaselessly, those deaths are no less shocking and horrific because they took place against backdrops that did not include the well-lit interior of a nationally franchised restaurant.